[cduzz]

No escape key? No problem! Ctl-[ to the rescue. If you really want to puzzle the kids let them loose on an old hpux or irix box where # is remapped to backspace and @ is remapped to kill...

That's a lovely terminal; makes me wish I'd held onto my vt220 just to show the kids all the weird things people used to have to put up with. I remember there was something deranged about it's keyboard that I eventually came to not really mind all that much. Eventually I spent years of my life in front of a decstation 3100 and I think I eventually got used to the strange layout.

[JdeBP]

Did you ever use those settings on an old printer terminal? Visible but unusual punctuation for erase and kill made sense with paper terminals, where back space was as non-destructive as forward space was.

(Amusingly, TianoCore makes BS destructive, and that breaks the spinners displayed by the NetBSD boot loader.)

One other amusing thing is that the LK201 et al. are RS423 at 4800 BPS 8N1, so with suitable voltage-level-converting adapters should be easier to plug in to modern SBC kit than a (non bimodal) PS/2 keyboard is.

[cduzz]

Oh, I understand why those old-time sysvr3.2 and sysvr4 systems would default to # backspace / @ kill -- even in the early 90s most places that ran unix had a weird zoo of different keyboards that would randomly put the backspace (or delete, or both!) keys in weird an inspired places, but the @ and # are usually in the same place everywhere. There were also some really old terminals that were basically just "screen is printer without paper" without even vt100 emulation mode (maybe they had fancy termcaps that'd let you run vi, but we only ever just used them on servers that weren't actually used too often, in the server room).

To this day, I use a 1990s vintage PS/2 keyboard, with a chain of adapters, on my mac (an old IBM M4-1 keyboard/trackpoint thing). At least on the mac it works perfectly because you can remap the caps lock key to command; it works pretty poorly on windows but such is life. Also, I very often, even today, use the # key as something akin to "kill" but instead in modern bash in vi mode if you're in escape mode it comments out the whole line.

But woof, watching people who'd never interacted with real (and old) sysv derived unixes instantly going insane trying to type things with @ or # and not understanding what's going on... kids that's what everyone had to fight with in the bad old days...

EDIT: and -- in old times, "backspace" and "delete" were actually different keys; bash and other modern shells hide this from you, (just as newline and carriage return were different actions) -- I guess learning how to type on a mechanical typewriter where you make the ! glyph with a ' and a backspace and a ., and where 1 and l were the same glyph, hopelessly burned the physicality of character rendering into me...